Data transmission through a telecommunication network for different applications may be performed with different quality of service. More bandwidth may be reserved for one application than for another, for example, packets may be given different treatment, delays in responses to requests may be shorter, or more average bandwidth may be available.
In the prior art various ways of adapting quality of service are known. This may involve adapting the parameters that affect quality of service for an application. Adaptation of a parameters that affect quality of service is known from an article by L.Noirie et al, titled “Semantic Networking: flow-based traffic-aware and self-managed networking”, published in the Bell Labs Technical Journal Vol 14 No 2 pages 23-39 (EPO reference XP001546635). parameter adaptation is also known from WO2009/082806.
Different adaptations may be needed for different applications, both due to differences in data traffic and maximum resources allocated for different types of applications. In the past, different quality of service policies for network transmission were provided only for data from a small number of fixed applications that were provided by the network operator (e.g. telephone calls), whereas all other data received the same undifferentiated quality of service, e.g. according to best effort, such as best effort Internet service.
Network based access control (NBAC) has been proposed to provide for more refined enforcement of different quality of service policies for data flows from different applications running at network terminal devices of a telecommunication network. When NBAC is used, different types of data flow are defined. A Resource and Admission Control Sub-system (RACS) is instructed to control allocation of resources in the network for packets of active data flows, dependent on the quality of service policy that has been defined for the data flow. Instructions from NBAC to RACS are triggered by the start of the data flow, which may be signalled explicitly or detected by means of deep packet inspection (DPI).
To apply network based access control, the network needs to have information that identifies different types of data flow and their associated quality of service policy. This may be done by explicitly identifying different types of data flow (associated with different types of application) and their respective quality of service policies in advance.
US2009/238071 proposes to use signatures of the streams to indentify different streams. The signatures are based on data derived from DPI. The document points out that when a new application or protocol is encountered, the data packets of the new application are analyzed and an appropriate signature is developed and added to a database, typically referred to as a signature library. Packets transmitted by a particular application or protocol are received, and the packets are analyzed using deep packet inspection to generate a signature. The signature may then be compared to entries in the signature library, and if a match is found, the data packets are identified as being associated with a particular application or protocol identified in the signature library. This could be done by a human system operator. The document does not explain how it is done. There is no indication that the system is designed to assist application owners from outside network management to enable them to define signatures.
WO02/19634 similarly discloses the use of DPI signatures to identify the type of application. The proposed system has a user management interface and a microcomputer is used recompile signature databases to accommodate new signatures. The microcomputer can also be used to learn and unlearn sessions identified by the traffic flow scanning engine. There is no indication that the system is designed to assist application owners from outside network management to enable them to define signatures.
As long as the number of applications remains small, the network operator may be expected to define the associated types of data flow and their quality of service policies. But it is envisaged that an increasing number of different applications will each require their own quality of service policy. Different known applications already include various forms of video play, teleconferencing, gaming etc. In view of the increasing number of different applications, it has been proposed to allow users of the network to define types of data flow and their quality of service policies from outside the network.
For new applications, or applications that are run infrequently in the same network, this may mean that the type of data flow and the associated quality of service policy may need to be defined from user terminals. In other words, this may mean that predefined quality of service policies for predefined types of data flow in network may not suffice. However, this raises a threshold for effective quality of service control, because users cannot always be expected to have the expertise required to identify and define types of data flow and associated quality of service policies.
WO03/065228 proposes a solution to lower this threshold. The document proposes to provide for the use of learning techniques in the communication network to adaptively “learn” the quality of service policy configuration that is needed for an application running in a user terminal When the user terminal submits a flow request for a new identified type of data flow, the network adapts its service rate or resource allocation until the needs of the new type of data flow are met. The network records the resulting service rate or resource allocation. Subsequently, when a user terminal starts another session of the same type, the network uses the recorded information to set the quality of service policy for that session.
Although the automatic selection of the quality of service policy based on actual performance of an example session simplifies control over telecommunication network based differentiation of quality of service policies from outside the network, it does not entirely remove the threshold. The application of the technique is limited to applications that report sessions with the identified type of data flow to the telecommunication network. Applications that do not do so would have to be modified to identify themselves.